I woke up this morning with a great sense of confidence, I felt like I could conquer the world! So I hopped up, ate a brisk breakfast, and sat down at my desk to do just that. I turned my computer on (yes, some people turn them off at night) and logged into KDE. The first step was obviously to check my email, to see if any world leaders had offered me a position as head honcho, as that would greatly bring my plans up to speed.
Kmail launched so I quickly maximized it and began my search. My eyes fell onto a nice bold 1423 right next to the label inbox. Good, in theory, the more new emails, the more likely I'll get what I'm looking for. My eyes skimmed down the long list of unread messages until all at once one of them seemed to pop out at me: "How wou1d u l1ke to ru1e the wor1d"
"ALL RIGHT! Oh wait, they can't fool me, there's always a catch!" I read on just to see. Turns out I was right, there was a catch, all they wanted was my credit card number, social security number, and access to my bank account. Actually, that was just what they said up front, after reading their fine print, it turns out I would also have to forfit all of my freedom and agree to be their slave for life. Quite a small price to pay for the world really... at least they aren't asking for my soul... oh wait, there at the bottom in the really fine print they are. All well, maybe there will be a better offer in the other 1422 new emails.
After 4 hours of sorting through emails, it turns out only one of them was from someone I knew, and it only consisted of "hey dude, sup?" Needless to say, I wasn't in quite the same mood as I was that morning.
I decided that wasn't such a great way to start a day, All that spam kinda put a damper on things. So I resolved to stop getting spam! YES, what a BRILLIANT IDEA! Oh, now how do I do that...
I started out by getting an entirely new email addres and notifying friends of my change. But I knew that wouldn't be enough, I had to prevent getting on the spammers lists'. So I decided to take some precautions.
- Never never post my email address on the internet in plain format! If I really really wanted to post it, I would do something like myname _at_ mydomain _dot_ com. That keeps crawlers from finding it.
- Created an address something@mydomain.com which simply forwards to my real email. I then use that addres when submitting to a form I don't completely trust to keep it privet. That way, if I ever get spammed at it, I can simply delete it.
- Before submitting to a form, make sure it says it will keep my email privet.
And that took care of it! I rarely got a spam email from that day on! Follow those steps and you can avoid spam too. Yeah yeah, use a spam filter... but they don't work perfectly... better not to get spam (unless you don't get anything otherwise and really want to feel important).
Please note that I have never felt like taking over the world (and it's a good thing too... because otherwise you would have a supreme dictator right now) nor gotten near 1422 spam emails in one day, but taking these percautions really do help eliminate spam in your email box.
